Andrew Schneider writes about public health and worker safety issues. His stories run the gamut from investigations of corporate and government cover-ups of toxic perils, to stories about gutsy federal , medical and industry workers doing what's right, to what makes the shrimp in your refrigerator glow at night and why white truffles might be worth $4,000 a pound.

We have millions of dedicated government workers, but stupidity often trumps logic: Air ambulances and peanut butter.

I’m back in Washington this week, the one on the Potomac. It didn’t take me long to remember that the person staffing the Oval Office may not have a lot to say about how the government really functions.

The absurdities of how agencies do their jobs continues to stun the new president’s team, especially when it comes to how the Food and Drug Administration has, and is, handling the salmonella-contaminated peanut butter products.

Congressional offices were fielding hundreds of calls and e-mails from constituents who were angered or incredulous when they learned that the FDA wasn’t permitted to order the enormous recall of thousands of products that used peanut butter or paste from the Peanut Corp. of America without permission of the company.

Let’s try this again. The federal food safety authorities who are trying to crack down on the tainted products that have sickened 550 people and killed at least eight can’t just shut the villain down?

No. Not even when the FDA can show that PCA has knowingly sold salmonella-contaminated peanut butter 12 times in the past two years.

Further, the company even gets to pick and choose the wording that FDA uses in the recall.

“It’s has been this way for years. The company’s feelings come before the health of the public,” an investigator who fought the battle in the field and in headquarters for years told me Tuesday.

“It’s stupid and painful to have to stand there with our federal hat in our hands waiting for the company’s approval of the language we use and whether or not we even send the damn recall out.”

Yesterday, both Congress and President Barack Obama said there would be a top-to-bottom review of FDA operations.

Meanwhile, 11 miles away from the FDA, the National Transportation Safety Board was working its way through four days of hearings on why med-evac helicopters were falling out of the sky across the country.

Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the safety board, said many of the nine fatal accidents could have been prevented and several of the almost three dozen fatalities could have been eliminated.

It looks as if we’re in another cycle of crashes, deaths, recommendations from the NTSB and failure of the Federal Aviation Administration to actually do anything.

The board says it will listen to more than 40 witnesses but has no plans to make recommendations.

“Why bother,” one accident investigator told me. “No matter what we say needs to be done, the FAA will again bow to the air ambulance industry and demand nothing.”

I have a troublesome perspective on why this NTSB expert is correct.

Twenty-three years ago, while at the Pittsburgh Press, two photographers and I investigated dozens of med-evac crashes and found many similar causes. Included were that hospitals that owned or leased the helicopters demanded or pressured air crews to fly in severe weather or greatly limited visibility, all to get the patients and their wallets back to their facilities. We were able to document that flight nurses, physicians, paramedics and patients were often killed when they struck their heads on sharp-edged emergency equipment attached to the ceilings and walls, or their spines and necks were broken when the flimsy seats collapsed. Meanwhile, up forward, pilots in helmets and strapped into crash-attenuating seats often survived the impact.

The NTSB confirmed many of our findings and issued a long list of recommendations for the FAA to make into laws and enforce.

Few, if any improvements were made, so again, hearings are being held on why livesavers were dying.